VENISS UNDERGROUND

A new edition of VanderMeer’s first novel, which set a template for much speculative strangeness to come.

Today VanderMeer is celebrated for twisting and stretching the familiar tropes of science fiction in taffylike ways and at epic scale, most famously in his Southern Reach trilogy. His debut novel, first published in 2003, is more compressed but blurs themes and styles in familiar VanderMeer-ian ways, combining cyberpunk, horror, noir, and myth while remaining remarkably cohesive. At the story’s center is Shadrach Begolem, who is on a mission to rescue his beloved, Nicola, who’s been kidnapped by Quin, a malevolent and powerful figure. Deep in the underground layers beneath the city of Veniss, Quin maintains a compound of humanity held in a “live storage” organ bank. The mood is dystopic when it’s not actively stomach-churning; aboveground, fish are “three-eyed and so scaly as to be coated in armor,” and belowground, “children were plucking the eyeballs out [of discarded donors] as if searching for shells on the beach.” Accompanying Shadrach on this crusade is a meerkat (or, rather the disembodied head of one), the creature of choice for cyborg assistance in this milieu. Yet for all the grotesque, uncanny strangeness that VanderMeer conjures up, he doesn’t lose sight of the love story at its center, playing with the themes of Orpheus descending to Hades to rescue his beloved Euridyce. And though later novels are more user-friendly, his audacity here is appealing; as VanderMeer himself rightly puts it in an afterword, the book is “a mutt, a mongrel, but, to me, oddly beautiful nonetheless.” Also included are a praise-filled introduction by science-fiction writer Charles Yu and a short story set in the same universe: “Balzac’s War.”

A worthy start to an innovative writer’s career.